Reanimated Linkin Park brought a career-spanning remix circus to T-Mobile

Brock Wilbur, Eli Ralls,
Screenshot 2025 09 02 At 55546pm

Photo by Eli Ralls

Linkin Park
with Jean Dawson
T-Mobile Center
Sunday, August 31

Over the holiday weekend, Linkin Park descended upon T-Mobile Center with their 2025 From Zero Tour. The relaunch of a legacy juggernaut in the wake of tragedy, along with a reconfigured line-up, made for a fascinating evening at one of the most perplexing stadium rock successes I’ve attended.

The support act opening the evening was Jean Dawson, the Mexican-American experimental pop artist who has released a few wildly diverse albums since 2018. Clad in a hoodie, an occasional mask, and sporting metallic fringe, the musician translated his eccentric style to the stage with a five-piece band. Dawson’s releases have often reminded me of what I found so endearing in early MySpace music breakout artists: a dedication to blending influences that shouldn’t work together, and with some frequency, actually don’t end up working together. That dedication itself, as a mix of sheer will and a drive to take chances, is the heart of what makes anything feel worth my time. Jean Dawson delivers overwhelmingly on that front. Whether the individual songs are ‘good’ takes a backseat for me. What if a song sounds like Michael Jackson until it drops the tuning and the shouting goes into an oddly-Godsmack space? What if (like on “THREE HEADS*“) you let Blood Brothersian allusion spikes merge jaggedly with a Journey-riff chorus? If you drizzle the right level of vocal swagger and a hint of auto-tune atop it, the whole thing blends into a more cohesive set than the songs would deliver on a Spotify playlist.

The T-Mobile crowd seemed engaged, if not fully on board, and that’s probably the best all involved could expect. Easily one of the most experimental acts you’ll catch ahead of a stadium gig this fall.

After a brief break and a full playthrough of “Fight For Your Right” accompanied by countdown clock, Linkin Park (2025 Iteration) filed onto the stage one member at a time—nodding towards the introductions of a pro sports team, memeber by member.

For those with only a passing familiarity with the group, Linkin Park spent the ’00s as THE stadium rock group, and owned a significant chunk of all alt-rock radio airtime. The early ’10s brought a few albums that weren’t exactly misses, but never found the platinum, cultural osmosis of the earlier LPs. In July of 2017, lead vocalist Chester Bennington died by suicide, and that seemed to spell the end for the nu-metal juggernaut. Then, 2023 brought a reformation and a countdown clock to the announcement of a new tour, a new album, and a new lead singer: Emily Armstrong of the band Dead Sara. The idea of anyone stepping into Bennington’s shoes, considering his signature knife’s edge scream and terrifying range, much less the concept of replacing the heart & soul of an act with this prestige and parasocial dedication.

By the time the appropriate chorus hit in opener “Somewhere I Belong”, Armstrong’s entrance absolutely annihilated the crowd. In recordings, she’d sounded like a better-than-expected approximation, but in the space of the room, it was dead to rights. If you’re going to make the choice to replace your primary vocalist, there could be almost no better choice for the sonic requirements here. Truly impressive work, and she continued to carry this throughout the evening. That’s about all that needs to be said regarding this swap, because the rest of the show has a lot to unpack.

The setlist to the show is represented in full beneath Eli Ralls’ fantastic photography work below. You might notice that it is… long. This was a long concert. Not just in terms of sheer inclusions on the list, but in how they were extended. The evening followed a jagged flow of three to four songs in a block, followed by most of the band leaving the stage and allowing individuals or duos to tackle solo features or extended jams—often forming some blended remix of what had come before or after. This was juxtaposed against extended segments where Mike Shinoda would walk the floor, doing crowd work and handing out birthday presents to fans. Early in the night, this had me shaking my head. It was a series of choices a band would make when they needed to extend a set list with filler—as if they didn’t have enough songs to fill the night or weren’t up to the challenge of keeping the energy consistent. As the show continued and continued and continued, it was clear that these extensions were not undercutting the sheer amount of main attraction songs in the night—it was part of a full three ring circus that the band wanted to bring to the center of the stadium.

Watching Shinoda banter with individuals in the crowd between songs like he was Al Roker on the Today show seemed silly, until you consider Linkin Park as an institution. Next to Foo Fighters, this band is one of the few at this international success level that exists in a bubble of near-infinite goodwill. To keep that environmental relationship cycle alive, the remaining members of LP need the opportunity to be exactly who they are—and who they are… well, they truly love their fans. And so having segments of one-on-one interaction with high fives and hugs that seemed more at home in a boy band stadium show… it is sincere. And it perhaps only seemed hokey at first because that sincerity is so rare in, say, nu-metal as a genre and a world. The more than Linkin Park wasn’t playing, the more I genuinely enjoyed the distractions.

The highest imaginable compliment I can offer on the evening—and my most unexpected—is that I have never seen a crowd of this size know every single word to a band’s new album with such a quick turnaround time. Their return LP with Armstrong, From Zero, was released in November of last year. With very few standalone single hits, this should’ve had all the makings of a “Hey, is it cool if we play another new song?” kind of night. Instead, many of the biggest numbers and greatest standouts were From Zero cuts—and every person around me knew every word. It was… disarming? I was ill-prepared for a fandom to be this dedicated to a sudden reimagining of a legacy act to give equal footing to tracks from 2024 and 2004.

The harshest criticism of the show is that, with the sheer number of backing tracks that Linkin Park uses to create their huge sound, there were large chunks of time at the start and end of songs where the music kept going but the entire band on stage was doing… nothing. This was somewhat compounded by what would happen in a few of the extended solo sections, where one or two people might be on stage, but it would sound exactly like the full band numbers. It makes it difficult to discuss the degree of musicianship in a nearly three-hour show. It sounded fantastic, but if you told me that the guitars weren’t even plugged in, would it have made a difference to what the stadium heard? At what points am I watching a six-piece hybrid rock act and when am I watching karaoke night for a group where several of the founding members are no longer a part of the tour?

This Linkin Park gig at T-Mobile might be the only time I’ve caught a stadium show and known that I don’t really need to pick any of it apart, and the concerns in the preceding paragraph aren’t important to evaluating what this was—because what this was is, by all accounts, an all-timer night. There was a near cartoonish degree of joy in this space, and it was generated for a band that I adore as people, in a room (and a time) where that level of joy is in short supply. For musicians whose output has always sounded like a glimpse of the future, my concerns about what is real and what is machine don’t need to apply.

The review is that everyone has the night of their lives. The details aren’t worth picking apart.

Our photographer Eli Ralls was there to capture the whole evening:

Linkin Park

Jean Dawson

Set List:

Somewhere I Belong
Crawling
Up From the Bottom
Lying From You
The Emptiness Machine
The Catalyst
Burn It Down
Cut the Bridge
Where’d You Go (Fort Minor)
Waiting for the End
Castle of Glass (w/ Jean Dawson)
Two Faced
Joe Hahn Solo
When They Come for Me / Remember the Name
Given Up
One Step Closer
Lost
Good Things Go
What I’ve Done
Overflow
Numb
Let You Fade
Heavy Is the Crown
Bleed It Out
Papercut
In the End
Faint

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